Get your private email, with custom domain, free!

Whether you are bootstrapping a small business, fought your boss and launching into the deep on your own or just side-hustling, there are some key things you need to do so people can take you seriously.

It could also be that you have a political activist group or running an NGO for orphans (I’m one, please help me!), you still have needs for certain work tools.

Having your domain name for your emails is sacrosanct if not people will think you are a joke. If you don’t think a custom domain email is important, trust me; you are probably a joke. But when Google Suite and others cost about $5 per user per month, being a joke could be less evil.

For small companies and NGOs, cash is always hard to get. And if you happen to be in Africa or especially Nigeria, many of the services you need: such as emails with your domain name, file hosting, etc. would be priced in US Dollar, something so rare to get these days. As rare as pink elephants.

Recently, while working on a project, I bumped into Zoho Mail, awesome email service but with a twist; there is a free plan!

With the free plan, if you can register your own domain name ($10 per year), you can get up to 25 users with 5GB of space for each of them for free. Your own [email protected]! As space is limited to 5GB, you won’t be able to keep a lot of junk in there. But then who cares? After all, once you have landed the big project and your magas have paid, you can always upgrade to the paid tier.

Years ago Google allowed anyone to create customer domain for up to 50 users free and then gradually reduced it until it became zero. This is how we host our Olowe.com email. Microsoft did the same thing with Outlook.com but bad belle people; they offered 500 users and then yanked everyone off!

By the way, if you are as vain as me, and you want your own [email protected] type email, Zoho Mail free plan will be OK for you, your siblings and your parents (if you still have them around). Being your family email administrator should make you relevant for the first time in your life; the feeling is awesome!